Friday, March 28, 2008

In today's New York Times, there's a story about a black Harlemite who is going to be teaching from Antarctica this fall. A guy called Dr. Stephen Pekar, a geologist at Queens College, recruited Shakira Brown, a 29-year-old science teacher, for the following reason:

“I’m tired of having a bunch of white people running around doing science,” said Dr. Pekar, who is white. “When it comes to Antarctica, it isn’t just the landscape that’s white.”

That's very true. When I was at McMurdo Station, station population was around 1,200—and yet there were only a small handful of black people, maybe less than 20 (or perhaps that's just how I remember it). Which leads to a funny story:

I was talking with a guy one day while working in Antarctica and he was trying to tell me a story about someone else, but I didn't know the guy he was talking about. He was telling me, oh, he's in the carp(enter) shop, he hangs out with so-and-so, he's about this tall, etc.

I'm trying to think who he was talking about and then I realize it. "Wait," I say. "You mean the black guy?" "Uh, yeah," my friend says. "Yeah, he's, um, he's African-American."

That seemed to me the height of absurdity. If we had been living on an island of four-foot-tall pygmies, would my friend have hesitated in describing the island's only pro basketball player as, "You know, that tall motherfucker"? I doubt it.

Some people have brown skin. So what? That's not usually the most easily identifiable characteristic about them—but it is when people with brown skin make up 1% of the population of wherever one's at.

But maybe my attitude on this results from growing up in the south, where it's no problem to say, Oh, yeah, the black/white guy. Also, African-American is often a misnomer: Not all black people come from Africa.

At any rate, I like this development and the story—diversity is always a good thing, and that'll be a treat this coming fall for Ms. Brown's students to see her working and teaching on the Ice.